Lumiere: Ann Demeulemeester, Fashion, Passion and the Female Form

In the fickle world of fashion, designers slip in and out of favour like so many monthly new flavours. But Ann Demeulemeester has spent the past nine years gracefully working her way into the collective design consciousness, slowly honing a vision of clothing which is modern romance at its best. Slick yet sensual, soft with big attitude, with each new collection the 36 year old designer sends out garments that seem perfectly right for our times. This season, in the face of frenzied catchcries of 'a new femininity', her long jersey t-shirt dresses falling off one shoulder in a sweep of fabric, the loosely cut drop-shoulder jackets and low-slung voluminous trousers posed an elegant challenge to preconceived ideas. And her shaggy-haired, disheveled models strutting self-contentedly to the gravel tones of Patti Smith suggested that there is another way to envisage the female ideal. But then, Demeulemeester has never dabbled in the prettiness that is the staple of the ruffle and bow brigade. A graduate of Antwerp's Royal Academy of Fine Arts, since she hired a truck with five of her fellow-students - the now legendary 'Antwerp Six' - and presented her first collection at London Fashion week in 1987, her star has been been steadily on the rise. The rigorous, almost architectural working of pattern and cut, combined with a poetic sense of fabric and silhouette, were an instant hit with stores such as Charivari and Barney's New York. And from that moment, she has committed herself to refining a singular vision, evolving a complex design aesthetic from one season to the next.
A modernist-romantic, the iron-willed Demeulemeester is a happy paradox. A cult figure among the cognescenti, she prefers the calm of her Antwerp home to the brouhaha of Paris fashion life. It's here, in a 1926 Le Corbusier pavilion, that she lives with her husband-partner Patrick and the star of this year's show, her 7 year old son Victor. A kind of island haven perched over an expressway in the wasteland between two suburbs, it's here that we met to talk about fashion, passion and the female form...
Click to continue

Photos (from top): Spring/Summer '96 [photography: Marleen Daniels]; Spring/Summer '96.